Epistemic discipline can transform worldviews

One of my recurring themes is that people underrate epistemic discipline: doing the most basic legwork of good thinking. Both critical thinking books and rationalist writings often focus on fallacies involving subtleties like the Monty Hall problem and Bayes’ Theorem.* But in my argument-checking work** I discovered that most fallacies that people make in real life are strikingly elementary. The most common error was bare assertion: not giving any argument whatsoever.

There are a number of other things I’d include in epistemic discipline besides actually giving a proper argument. They are all on the theme of restraining your impulses and keeping your eye on the ball:

• Rein in your emotions

• Defer to your epistemic peers and superiors

• Be reasonably clear and explicit (avoid vague associations and metaphors)

• Pay attention to what actually matters

• Don’t lean into motivated reasoning and self-deception

These principles vary a bit in how easy they are to follow (the last one being the hardest; though it’s easier if you follow the others), but overall, I don’t think it’s unfeasible to be a relatively disciplined thinker. Actually, many people’s thinking is already fairly disciplined in some contexts. In their work, lawyers and civil servants mostly listen to their peers, refrain from outrage, and express themselves with an adequate degree of precision. This seems to suggest that a decent amount of epistemic discipline isn’t beyond the reach of many people.

Epistemic discipline is generally valuable, but especially so when it comes to big-picture questions about human nature, what society is like, how we ought to lead our lives, and so on: what’s often called our “worldview”. Since worldview questions tend to be confusing and emotionally fraught, most of us by default think about them in a careless, ill-disciplined way. So, by exercising epistemic discipline, most people could transform their worldviews.

Let’s look at a few examples.

1. Who has ultimate power in society? Some think that big companies are more powerful than governments, but that appears to be the product of politically motivated reasoning; of resentment of big companies. If we soberly look at the facts, we notice that companies are the subject of many regulations they’d rather avoid. This becomes especially true in times of crisis, but holds more generally. That flies in the face of the view of companies as all-powerful.

2. How well does society work? Some claim that society is deeply dysfunctional. But if we zoom out from the problems of today and look at society with fresh eyes, another picture emerges. Consider the difficult problem of distributing food safely to millions of city-dwellers. While once many died from food poisoning, it’s now largely a non-issue thanks to enormous improvements. As anyone who approaches these issues with epistemic discipline notices, such examples multiply (aviation accidents, traffic accidents, infant mortality, etc.). Thus, a disciplined thinker must acknowledge that our institutions and our overall social system are at least decently functional.

3. What will the future be like? In line with their pessimism about today’s society, many people believe in implausibly pessimistic visions of the future. And many of those who are more levelheaded in that regard instead make other errors. They fixate on a particular aspect of the future (climate change, fertility rates, etc.), neglecting to integrate different trends into an overall picture. For instance, they neglect the role of AI, which many forecasters believe will play an enormous role in the relatively near future, and which could have major effects on other trends. But integrating different trends is Epistemics 101—it makes no sense to ignore obviously relevant considerations when you’re trying to predict the future. Again we see that basic epistemic discipline would do much to improve widely held worldviews.

There are many more examples one could give, of everything from the nature of status-seeking to how to think about do-gooding to the extent to which we live in a meritocracy to human enhancement, but hopefully these ones suffice to convey why I think epistemic discipline could transform most people’s worldviews. It doesn’t require learning advanced statistical concepts or avoiding subtle reasoning traps like the Monty Hall problem. All it takes is to follow rock-bottom principles of good reasoning, while reining in the impulses that block us from doing that. The epistemology that matters most is simpler than most people realise.

* Steven Pinker discusses how people err when they encounter the Monty Hall problem in his recent book Rationality. Discussion on the centrality of Bayes’ Theorem to the rationalists can be found here.

** Argument-checking is akin to fact-checking, but about arguments. I analysed opinion-pieces and political debates and scored them on a scale from 0 to 10.

Thanks to Lucius Caviola for helpful comments.